Challenging the myth of a permanent criminal legal institution in social work education in the United States

This chapter argues that the criminal legal system (CLS) is presented in social work education as an unchangeable, permanent institution and that current social work theory—primarily taught in the Human Behaviour in the Social Environment series—is not capable of capturing dynamic theories of historical change. It further argues that social work education should be supplemented with humanistic, social constructivist theories of change. The authors make their case for the myth of permanent institutions by outlining how the historical deconstruction and reconstruction of the CLS in the United States has produced different-looking models at different times. For example, prior to the Civil War in the United States, the ecological systems model would have included chattel slavery as an overarching institution that impacted a given person-in-environment. With the abolition of chattel slavery in 1865, new institutions of social control were born. Including the history of different social institutions and building different ecological models for different time periods would be a simple but effective strategy for teaching social workers in training to question seemingly permanent institutions and imagine possibilities for a different world.